I don't have the express written consent of Major League Baseball

(Posted from: Helen Hall Library, League City, TX. The internet access I was stealing before has gone totally kaput, so I'm forced to roam around looking for it. There are three or four locations where I can do this. This is one of them.)

So, it's October. My favorite month of the year, by far. Why? 'Cause the weather is nice, Halloween is my favorite holiday (and one of my favorite Dave Matthews songs), and--most important--it's the baseball postseason. The official MLB slogan for the playoffs is "I Live For This!", and it's a sentiment I can empathize with.

Unfortunately for me, the Astros couldn't quite make it to the playoffs, finishing just behind the Cardinals in the oogliest division in baseball, the National League "Comedy" Central, and are out playing golf right now. Same with the Boston Red Sox, who choked early and never caught up with the Yankees. And my other team, my childhood favorite Los Angeles Dodgers, played like liquid fire in the last two months of the season, won the Wild Card, and were then unceremoniously swept by the New York Mets, who didn't have most of their top players: no Pedro Martinez, no El Duque, and Cliff Floyd hurt his Achilles tendon.

So, with my three favorite teams out of the running, watching the postseason becomes an exercise in cheering for whoever is playing one of the Enemies. As there are three teams I root for, there are also three teams I just as passionately root against--those teams being, of course, the New York Yankees, the St. Louis Cardinals, and the Atlanta Braves.

Luckily for me, though, the Braves didn't make the playoffs (the last time that happened, I was nine years old and living in Springfield, Missouri), and Joe Torre is a complete retard who thinks that Jaret "Chunk" Wright is a good guy to send to the mound when you're facing elimination on the road. It also doesn't help that the Yankees haven't been able to hit in the postseason since Game 3 of the 2004 ALCS, which they won 19-8. Since that game, the Yankees are 3-10 in the playoffs. Yeah!

So, now I'm left rooting for the Mets, A's or Tigers to beat the Cardinals. I don't really care which one does it, but I hope it's embarassing, like in 2004, when they made it to the World Series after that classic NLCS with the Astros, only to get swept by the goddamn Boston Red Sox, who had been cursed by the baseball gods for nearly a century. Or last year, when Albert Pujols pulled the baby out of the fire in game 5 of the NLCS with a ginormous homer off Brad Lidge that blew out of Minute Maid Park and achieved geosynchronous orbit seventeen minutes later, only to go to game 6 and have Roy "Cheerie" Oswalt shut them down completely, at home, in the last game ever at Busch Stadium. That was fun.

My money's on the Tigers. The Cardinals are playing too well right now, the Mets are banged up, and they have a chance to squeak by to the Series, where they'll probably play Detroit. Of course, once they get to the American League, either team is dead meat no matter who they're playing, so.

But I hope Albert Pujols comes up in the ninth inning of the deciding game -- the bottom of the ninth, 'cause they're in St. Louis. Cardinals down by three, bases loaded, two outs. The entire world watching this one at-bat. His entire career comes down to this. Three balls, two strikes. And the pitch...

And he takes it for strike three. The Mets/Tigers/A's rush the field and celebrate as the Cardinal fans watch in horror. Pujols slinks off the field and spends the entire offseason reliving that moment, knowing he ended the season with his bat on his shoulder.

Hey, once your teams are out of the running, you gotta find something to root for.